European regulatory and science advisory bodies are intensifying their focus on hazardous mixtures. Companies should pay heed. Over the last decade, though US regulators have worked on chemical mixtures, most initiatives to restrict chemicals in products and supply chains have come from Europe and have then impacted American manufacturers and retailers.

Increased knowledge of mixture effects means that levels of chemicals once judged by risk assessors and regulators to be safe when considered in isolation will no longer be deemed so innocent. Some scientists have applied the label of "something from 'nothing' " to such individually safe chemical doses that together form a toxic mixture. Scientists have also identified synergistic effects of chemical mixtures -- where toxic effects of individual chemicals are multiplied rather than just added.

The centuries-old idea that "the dose makes the poison" has been expanding to "the dose and timing make the poison" to account for the sensitivity of fetuses and other vulnerable populations. It should be further enlarged to "the dose, timing and mixture make the poison." This change in framing the toxicity issue is essential to move thinking beyond predominant quantitative risk assessment methods that emphasize risks of isolated individual chemicals. The existing chemical-by-chemical approach creates a false illusion of chemical safety and surely understates the cumulative risk posed by chemical mixtures.

Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, have recently published fresh evidence of human exposures to chemical mixtures. Their report documents pregnant women's exposure to multiple chemicals that may harm development of their fetuses; many of the measured pollutants have been found in cord and fetal blood and amniotic fluid. Ninety-nine to 100 percent of the women had measurable levels of controversial chemicals found in products and supply chains, such as phthalates, brominated flame retardants and the perfluorinated compounds traditionally associated with non-stick cookware and stain- and grease-repellency treatments.

A December 2009 State of the Art Report on Mixture Toxicity (pdf) commissioned by the European Commission's Environment Directorate (the European Counterpart of USEPA) underscored the challenge of aligning quantitative risk assessment with the reality of multiple chemical exposures.

Products can contain more than one chemical, production sites can release chemical mixtures, and chemical mixtures are commonly found in air, water and food. The many biological mechanisms through which toxic impacts can occur add an additional level of complexity. This daunting challenge notwithstanding, the report recommended that European guidelines be developed for the assessment of chemical mixtures and that the legal mandate for assessing risks from mixtures be strengthened.

San Francisco, CA — An evening with Sustainability leaders discussing how to implement best practices and maximizing ROI for your organization.

Panelists:

Nancy Parmer, Sustainability Manager
UPS

As Manager of Sustainability, Customer Solutions Group, Nancy’s expertise supports the ethical corporate practices associated with UPS’s economic, environmental and social leadership. Her position requires collaboration with external audiences, including government agencies, NGO’s, customers, and other companies, to serve as a resource for environmental knowledge, concepts and green solutions.

Nancy was awarded the 2008 Global EXEC Women International Women of Influence Award for outstanding international contribution by a female executive in the large business category.

Nancy brings an extensive amount of domestic and international experience in logistics and transportation management. In her prior position, Director of Logistics Services for the Asia Pacific region, she was stationed in Hong Kong. Her team oversaw the build out and implementation of several multi-client logistics warehouses for clients such as GE Medical and Philips Medical Systems. Her work in China also included an open exchange and appreciation of each others’ cultural diversities.

John Malian, Global Supply Chain Manager - Design for Sustainability
Cisco

John Malian is a Global Supply Chain Manager in the Design for Sustainability Organization at Cisco Systems. He is a twelve-year veteran at Cisco Systems, starting within the Test Engineering Organization and moving to Environmental Sustainability in early 2009. John’s focus areas include: Life Cycle Assessment, Product Carbon Footprint, Power Efficiency, and management of the environmental impact of Cisco’s global supply chain. John received his degree in Computer Engineering and Mathematics at California State University, Chico in 1998 and obtained his Masters in Business Administration from the University of Phoenix while working at Cisco.

Moderated by Hanson Bridgett Partner, Jonathan Storper.

Pre-registration is required. Register at: http://hbsustainablemarchforum.eventbrite.com/
Space is limited.

Contact Information

SAN DIEGO, CA — Eighteen months ago, in the fevered run-up to the Copenhagen climate summit, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's lobbying priorities caused an uproar in the business and environmental communities. The group's stance on climate legislation led a number of companies to abandon the chamber.

What a difference a year and a half can make. With hopes for climate legislation in the U.S. dead in the water, the chamber dust-up seems like a quaint memory.

But even as the policy front goes from bad to worse, the greening of business is only getting better, and a new group based in San Diego hopes to harness the networking power of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and put it toward environmental initiatives.

The U.S. Green Chamber, launched last weekend, is the evolution of the Green Chamber of San Diego, a spinoff of a Chamber of Commerce chapter in San Diego County. Now, with a national focus and an ever-expanding membership roster, the group hopes to take its successes, and its membership of about 250 companies -- mostly in Southern California, but with some members across the country -- and scale them up to the national level.

"It's been our vision since the beginning that we do something bigger than San Diego," U.S. Green Chamber CEO David Steel explained in an interview. "This is just the right time -- I don't think we have many years to wait and see what happens. And right now, there's a really good relationship between the environmental side of things and the business side of things."

That good relationship is due in large part to the economic savings from environmental projects -- something we document every day on GreenBiz.com -- as well as the growing number of businesses focused on helping companies get greener and more efficient.

While the national Chamber of Commerce is known primarily for its lobbying prowess, for now, the U.S. Green Chamber is focused on real-world implementations, on bringing companies together to share expertise and best practices. In that sense, Steel said the Green Chamber is more of a complement to the Chamber of Commerce, rather than a replacement.

"We do some of the same things that the chamber offers," Steel said. "We're an advocate for the business, we help them establish their credibility in the community, and visibility as well. But we also layer the sustainability commitment on top of it -- no matter where you are with your sustainability projects currently, you have to make our commitment."

The Green Commitment developed by Steel's company is a roadmap for getting started on green initiatives. It starts with a commitment to put one person in charge of coordinating a company's sustainability goals and projects, and then lays out a menu of projects almost any company can undertake.

Here's a simple but powerful idea:

People have the right to know where things come from and what they are made of.

That's the idea behind a free open-source, volunteer-driven platform called Sourcemap. Sourcemap will soon make its mass market debut, thanks to a partnership between Office Depot and New Leaf Paper.

The goal of the partnership is, not surprisingly, to sell more recycled paper. While you'll get some argument about this, experts say that recycled paper saves trees, energy and water, produces less pollution, uses more benign chemicals, and requires less bleaching than virgin paper production.

The trouble is, recycled paper -- for now -- costs more. That's largely a problem of scale. If there were more demand for recycled paper, there would be more incentive to collect used paper, more infrastructure devoted to recycling and costs would come down.

So, to drive up sales and eventually drive down costs, Office Depot and New Leaf want to show customers -- institutions, small companies and individuals -- the environmental benefits of recycled paper, in part by telling them exactly where their paper come from.

"We're trying to make environmental paper mainstream," says Jeff Mendelsohn, the president and co-founder of New Leaf, which develops, markets and distributes environmentally-preferable paper.

Beginning later this year, shoppers who buy Office Depot's 100 percent Forest Stewardship Council-certified recycled paper will be able to use their mobile phones to read a QR code (a kind of barcode) on the package. They'll then see a movie, like this one, that traces their paper back to its source. This paper was tracked from the GreenBiz's State of Green Business Forum 2011 in Washington, D.C., back to the streets of Milwaukee. Please take a look:

I spoke with New Leaf's Jeff Mendelsohn and Yalmaz Siddiqui, director of environmental strategy at Office Depot, last week in Washington, where they gave a lively talk on their project.

"We are two green businessmen, and we both love paper," said Yalmaz. "But," he continued, "We also like trees."

It took a village to get this project going -- not just Office Depot, New Leaf and Sourcemap, but MIT's Materials Systems Laboratories, UK-based Carbon Trust and the Wisconsin pulp mill where the paper is made. Corporate sustainability is, inevitably, a team sport.

It’s that time of year again; time for the second annual Tommies, my 2010 kudos to the most impressive of recent bio-inspired designs or discoveries. As always, I will arrange the awards by the creatures that inspired the innovations, and invite any of the discoverers to have an Irish coffee with me at the Buena Vista in San Francisco.

1. The tardigrade, or water bear, was the inspiration for Biomatrica’s method of preservation without refrigeration. This tiny, common invertebrate can be found in the soil of your front lawn or the waters of the Arctic Ocean, and is one of the more fascinating animals in our world. It depends on a surrounding film of water for gas exchange and to avoid drying out. It can stand extremes of temperature from -80 degrees C  to over +80 degrees C, pressures 6,000 times greater than our deepest ocean trench or the vacuum of space, and about 500 times the radiation it would take to kill us.

Should the tardigrade dry out, it can lapse into a state of crytobiosis, or suspended animation, for as much as 120 years and emerge quite alive after the addition of water.  

This process of anhydrobiosis, or life without water, was studied by Biomatrica president and founder Rolf Muller and applied to the preservation of laboratory samples. The company claims that tissue, cells and biopsies can be stored without damage and without the long term risk and cost of refrigeration. Each sample is wrapped in a thermo-stable, synthetic film that mimicks the chemistry of the tardigrade. When needed the sample can be rehydrated without loss of vitality (tissue, cell or DNA damage).

The implications of this innovation go well beyond laboratory sample storage and could be a tremendous help in the global public health effort, where vaccines, samples and supplies often are not delivered to patients because of a lack of refrigeration.

2. The mussel has, for many years, been the poster-child-in-waiting for the bio-inspired design community, and it appears that this bivalve will be coming out of its shell in the near future. Mussel byssus is well-known for its ability to adhere to rocks in the turbulent intertidal zone and many teams of scientists have been studying the proteins that make up these anchor threads. Why? It is because the mussel is able to produce this strong adhesive underwater, at ambient temperatures and with no toxic byproducts. Moreover, the creature can fine-tune this adhesive for a whole range of performance and relative permanence.

Now scientists at the University of Chicago have applied for a patent for a synthetic version of mussel glue, an adhesive, self-healing gel. The potential remains exciting; biomedical transplants and repairs along with underwater mechanical engineering remain the chief areas where this material will have a significant impact. The innovation illustrates how important cross-collaboration over years of research can be.

Key to their breakthrough was using metal ions for molecular bonding rather than the typical permanent covalent bonding in most synthetic polymers. Other synthetic polymers had not performed well for both strength and ductility in the past: The tightly bonded  material became too brittle as it was strengthened. As any structural engineer knows, a part of a bridge that is too strong can weaken the whole structure as much as a weak part. Changing the pH of the material also enabled them to change its properties. 

What are the bio-innovation concepts here? Strength from shape, in this case at the molecular scale, and solving contradictions, in this case by changing the dominant parameters of the problem.

3. The sea urchin is also an amazing creature from the intertidal zone and literally chews on rock to make its living, grazing across the litho surface and carving out shallow pits to anchor itself. Pupa Gilbert, a physics professor from University of Wisconsin-Madison discovered that, surprisingly, tooth breakage is what makes their dentition so effective. 

Its tooth material is a biomineral mosaic composed of calcite crystals with two forms — plates and fibers — arranged crosswise and cemented together with super-hard calcite nanocement. Between the crystals are layers of organic materials. Since the organic layers are softer than the crystals, they break first and fail in a plane that guarantees optimum sharpness. It’s a bit like breaking off the scored bits of your razor knife as they dull, but on a much smaller and more integrated scale. Self-sharpening tools based on this kind of material logic will indeed be a boon. The bio-design concepts here are the use of composites to solve performance contradictions, controlled failure of parts for optimum success of the system (do autumn leaves come to mind?), and functionally graded material formed from a few basic components.

4. The elephant is the earth’s largest land animal, stumping its tons across varied landscapes. Almost comically contrapuntal to its lumbering frame is its ultra-dexterous and delicate trunk. Festo, the automation company, has added the elephant to the list of their animal inspirations, this time for a robotic arm. With nearly unlimited degrees of freedom of movement, trunks, tails and cylindrical bodies have been employed successfully for millions of years of reaching, grabbing and holding on. This product may represent a market trend toward more “softbots,” as performance capacity and expertise has grown in  robotic research facilities.

5. The Homo sapien, or, more precisely, his skull anatomy, was the inspiration for an innovative helmet design from Lazer, the Belgian helmet manufacturer. Next time you get a scalp massage, you may appreciate the concept that is key to the innovation. Your scalp moves across your bony skull, of course, and, in this ability is part of a damage control system for your brain. In a glancing fall, this flexible skin absorbs the shear force applied to your head and lessens the impact to the precious contents. Head trauma is the leading cause of motorcycle accident fatalities, and most of these are because the head is turned rapidly on impact and the brain, floating loosely inside, follows, tearing blood vessels and nerve fibers.

The new design, named SuperSkin, employs a synthetic skin that floats on a gel cushion outside of the hard liner. This skin is able to stretch up to eight times and the company claims that this technology reduces rotational impact by 50 percent, and possible brain damage by 67 percent.